Even now, AI and robotics may be ushering in a new world that will render the current world’s allegiances meaningless. As the new order approaches, actors would have to exploit the outgoing order to carve for themselves a place in the next. Within the largest nation-states, for example, citizenship ultimately confers no long-run protection. Only gaining and retaining exclusive control over certain critical systems, especially military ones, does. Still, democratic and free-market mechanisms are useful instruments for achieving such control for as long as credulous populations still cling to them.
At the same time, to forge successful alliances rooted in the new order, the same actors would need to craft narratives justifying defection from the old one. When putting these two contradictory concerns together, we should expect a confusing remixing of familiar narratives. Declaring political opponents as “enemies of democracy” or protests against genocide as “domestic terrorism,” for example, perform this balancing act of recruiting allies and other temporarily useful collaborators while also squeezing as much complacency as possible from the general population.
In a way, the end-state equilibrium is reminiscent of the pre-historic human social order, before human labor became exploitable. So it may be helpful to conceptualize the path to it as a form of backsliding, passing through intermediate states resembling other pre-modern social forms constrained by zero-sum competition, such as feudalism. When we observe the reemergence of feudal norms of the powerful promising protection in exchange for loyalty, along with rapid advances in autonomous weapons systems and the rhetorical and the actual dismantling of the nation-state, we should recognize this convergence for what it potentially represents: preparation for a world where most humans are no longer necessary.